I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  She’d hear these people making deals in the morning. “It’s Oxy. It’s Percocet, that Suboxone, all of that. They get scripts, they sell them.”

  Eric Garner would come a little later in the day, around 8:00 or 9:00 A.M., to catch the tail end of that morning wave. Diana got along with him right away. “He had that Fat Albert look, but he was a good guy, he really was. Everybody loved him,” she says. “And he was out here, rain or shine, grinding, seven days a week.”

  Diana learned early on that if she cooked anything and word got out, Garner would tweak her about it. “Oh, you out here giving everybody something,” he’d say. “But you didn’t make me no sandwich.” She learned that he would eat absolutely anything, with three exceptions. “Anything that had red peppers, green peppers, or onions,” she says, laughing.

  She got a good feeling about him, although she could tell he wasn’t well. “His eyes was always running, his nose was always running, always big ashy hands. He was a croupy little thing at times. Shit, when he drank anything, it would go down his shirt,” she says.

  Garner positioned his shop perfectly. In addition to the early morning junkies, there were drunks and shoplifters who came to Tompkinsville because several of the neighborhood shops doubled as fences. You could swipe something off a shelf in a Stapleton store a mile or two away and bring it down to Tompkinsville to sell right back to another storefront for a few bucks.

  Then you’d take your cash and buy one-dollar mini-bottles of booze at Shaolin Liquor on the corner of the park, a little place with a green-and-white awning that read WINES & LIQUOR TOMPKINSVILLE PARK out front. And once that crowd started drinking, they started digging in their pockets to find change for smokes.

  There was also the working crowd. People on their way to the Staten Island Ferry, ready for a day’s work in Manhattan, would stop on the way and load up on cheap smokes. People in suits bought from Garner just like addicts and drunks.

  He mostly stood at a stoop near 220 Bay Street. Whether selling himself or watching others sell, he kept his eyes peeled for potential problems.

  By then Garner and Diana’s ex, McCrae, had become friends. The two used to stand together on Bay Street for hours each day. In the afternoons, they would often be joined by a third man, James Knight, who, like them, was an ex-con from Brooklyn. Knight had made his way to Staten Island at the end of a long road battling heroin addiction.

  Knight was tall and physically imposing like Garner and McCrae. He’d found religion and gotten clean and now spent most of his mornings volunteering at a local shelter and food pantry called Project Hospitality. If Garner’s talent was for numbers, Knight was a born politician, with the gift of gab. He kept current on everyone’s business and had a word for every person he passed.

  “Hey, girl, how you doing?”

  “Your uncle out of the hospital yet?”

  “I’ll text you, baby, I’ll text you!”

  Like the other two, Knight had done time for drug dealing in the early nineties, but he was more of a user than a dealer. He’d been a heroin addict since his teens.

  His mother had also struggled with dope. After school he used to find her wandering the projects of East New York in a nod, many blocks from home. James would take her by the elbow and guide her back to their apartment. “Sometimes we’d have to go through two or three projects,” he said. “And people would be staring and laughing at me. But I didn’t care. She was my mother and I loved her.”

  All the same, James would quietly glance at his mother as he towed her home and make a promise to himself: “That is never going to happen to me.”

  Not many years later, when he was a hard-partying teenager, he sent a friend to buy some coke and the friend came back with dope instead. James thought, “I bought it, I might as well try it.” He leaned over, took a line, and any heroin addict knows the rest of the story. He spent the next thirty-three years getting high.

  In 1991 James met some Puerto Rican drug dealers in Spanish Harlem who liked his gregarious personality and his gift for languages (he’d learned Spanish working in a bodega as a kid). He started dealing with them, but it turned out that avoiding police was not among his gifts. He was arrested after about five minutes.

  He bailed out of jail and made a fateful decision. Afraid of prison, he decided to flee rather than stand trial. He spent five long years as a fugitive, carefully obeying every conceivable law so as not to get swept up in the zero-tolerance Stop-and-Frisk police dragnet he’d heard about, one that was ostensibly designed to catch people just like him.

  “I read the news,” Knight says now. “I didn’t jaywalk or even think about jumping a turnstile. I was aware.”

  In a comical indictment of the ineffectiveness of Stop-and-Frisk, Knight eluded the net for five years and ended up getting caught not by street cops but by a stray bullet. He walked into a grocery store on New Year’s Eve in 1996 and was in the process of leaning forward to give a female friend in the store a holiday hug when a tipsy store owner accidentally discharged a pistol he kept under his counter.

  The bullet passed through the counter, through James’s thigh and testicles, and rested in the other leg. James stumbled around in a daze and woke up in a hospital, where police became suspicious when he didn’t want to press charges. They ran his name and found his old dealing warrant. He ended up doing a bid in Rikers Island. Although Knight had been terrified of prison, he thrived inside. He says his language skills got him elected dorm rep in Rikers and the store owner who shot him felt so bad he kept his commissary account full, allowing James to have his fill of cigarettes, cookies, chips, and whatever else they sold on the inside.

  “I know how this sounds, but I had a great time,” he says. “It wasn’t like it was for other people. I was in four months, and I didn’t have any trouble.”

  James got out of Rikers in late 1996. He was thirty-four years old. He went right back on drugs.

  Thirteen years later, at the age of forty-seven, he finally got clean. He was living in Staten Island by then, and for a time he tried selling cigarettes to make a little extra cash. That’s how he met Eric Garner. Knight says he was only briefly in the bootleg smokes business, but he remained friends with Eric and spent most afternoons hanging with him on Bay Street.

  Knight, Garner, and McCrae became fixtures of the hood, the Three Wise Men of Needle Park, talking to girls who passed by, joking with one another, and passing the time. DiDi was never very far. Sometimes when it was cold, they would all duck inside her hallway in the middle of the 200 block on Bay Street, a narrow smoke-filled space Knight jokingly called the “Boom-Boom Room.”

  They also kept close watch on the crowd in the park. Garner broke up a lot of fights. Arguments, violence of any kind, vandalism, all of that stuff brought police, and police were bad for business. “He spent a lot of time worrying about who was making the block hot,” is how one of his friends put it, years later.

  It was a good setup. Garner had a prime location, a stone’s throw from the ferry docks. Soon he was doing a booming trade. At its height he was clearing hundreds of dollars a day or more in profit.

  He enjoyed selling smokes. He’d wholesale cartons to other men on the street and then compete with them for customers. A drunk would head toward one of the other men selling smokes at the park, and Eric would step forward with a rap.

  “Nah, nah, don’t fuck with him! Bring that money here. Bring that money!” he’d say.

  At first, he used nearby Native American reservations to supply. He wasn’t alone. By early 2011, the Poospatuck Reservation, located just south of the Montauk Highway in the middle of Long Island, was taking delivery of about 6.6 million cartons per year, which worked out to be about two-thirds as much as the 10 million legally sold cartons in New York State.

  The Poospatucks only had a tax exemption to sell to other tribe members, of which there were about three hundred. That meant millions of people a year were thumbing their nose at Bloomberg’s revenue plan.


  Furious at the widespread revolt against the taxes, the state in mid-2011 began to effect mass seizures of cigarettes destined for Native reservations. The heat forced Garner to move farther south. He tried a number of states, including Delaware, before settling eventually on Virginia. He bought cartons of cigarettes there cheaply enough that he could make very nearly a 100 percent profit back in Staten Island, even after expenses.

  The beauty of the scheme from Garner’s point of view was the risk-to-profit ratio. Once you got the cigarettes near the street, the risk of punishment was very small. For mere possession of untaxed cigarettes, the state couldn’t even hit you with a misdemeanor. Possession alone was just a violation, and the state could at most fine you $150 for each carton above five you had on your person. The same law said selling untaxed cigarettes in most any street-ready quantity was just a misdemeanor.

  It was the reverse of the crack situation, where the state created disproportionately draconian penalties for selling the kind of cocaine that black people in the projects bought. This time, for once, the loophole ran in the other direction.

  It was the perfect setup, and Garner himself from time to time marveled at the opportunity the mayor had created for him.

  “He had a term for it,” McCrae says. “He called it ‘felony money, misdemeanor time.’ ”

  —

  Eric Garner may have created a lot of his own problems, but he was also the victim of bad luck and atrocious timing.

  In the eighties and early nineties, when he was beginning to deal drugs, the crack dealer had become public enemy number one. Garner also happened to ply his trade in the worst possible place: New York State, ground zero for the mass incarceration movement. New York’s then governor Mario Cuomo spent the eighties and early nineties funding more than thirty new prisons using a loophole in an urban development law that, perversely, had been intended to create jobs in inner cities.

  It was also the era of the infamous 100:1 laws, when long mandatory sentences kicked in for selling crack in weights 100 times smaller than the weights required to send a powder-cocaine dealer away. And Garner went to jail for crack dealing at a time when 72 percent of the illegal drug users in New York City were white, but 90 percent of the people who went to jail for selling drugs were black or Hispanic.

  By the time Garner stopped dealing hard drugs, police had shifted tactics, and in moving to cigarettes, Garner was swimming right into the riptide. Now the number one enforcement target on the streets was the minor criminal. The new watchword was “order.” Police had a mandate to shake down anyone who made the streets look disorganized and unruly.

  Garner was harmless, but he was also a massive, conspicuous, slovenly dressed black man standing on a city block during work hours. People like him would become the focus of a law enforcement revolution that by the late 2000s had become intellectual chic across America with a powerfully evocative name: Broken Windows.

  FIVE GEORGE

  In rural Minnesota in the fall of 1963, a young white midwesterner named George Kelling was offered a new job.

  Kelling was game for new experiences. He would be afflicted his whole life by a kind of intellectual wanderlust, drifting back and forth between the seemingly disparate poles of law enforcement and academics. Both realms fascinated him.

  When he completed his studies as an undergraduate seminarian and philosophy student, he immediately took a job in the thick of real life, working as a parole officer in Minneapolis.

  After doing that for a few years, he left the streets to go back to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he got a master’s in social work. After that, he once again pivoted to a tough city job, serving as the assistant superintendent of juvenile detention in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area. He worked primarily with a ninety-bed holding facility for troubled young people.

  He was still working the Hennepin County job when he was offered a gig in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, about twenty miles northeast of the Twin Cities. The sixty-four-bed facility was looking for a fresh face to run the place.

  “The previous administration believed in a philosophy of allowing children to act out almost regardless of the consequences,” recalls Kelling now. “Children were attacking staff, each other, were acting out sexually, were destroying the facility.”

  A new and firmer hand was needed. Kelling had the academic chops for the treatment side but also had enough experience with the justice system and adult parolees to handle the hard stuff. And he was intrigued by the chance to try out some ideas he’d been pondering.

  Kelling believed that kids could not get the help they needed while they were surrounded by chaos—they needed to experience at least a minimal level of violence-free order before they could benefit from any treatment. To achieve this, institutions would have to lay down simple and consistent rules and exercise a firm hand in enforcing them. Order was essential to creating a safe—and temporary—institutional experience.

  “Keep their institutionalization as short as possible,” Kelling says now, describing his thought process. “It doesn’t matter how good an institution is, they can be and are dangerous places.”

  Another idea Kelling had was to discourage programs that accentuated a feeling of separateness and segregation.

  “Don’t build a chapel. Take those children who want to go to church to local churches,” he says. “Don’t build a swimming pool. Use local pools. Don’t start a scout program; join the local scout program. And so on.”

  Kelling, like a lot of young people in the sixties, was moved by a spirit of idealism. This was the age of space exploration, the Peace Corps, of sweeping changes in law and race relations. The Supreme Court had struck down school segregation in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and in 1961 had taken on police corruption in Mapp v. Ohio, which made it impossible to prosecute people on the basis of illegally seized evidence.

  Two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, the ultimate articulation of the better world this generation hoped to create.

  Nobody back then was into half measures. The craze in the Kennedy years was for magic bullets, total cures, conquests. Through ingenuity or just brute industrial force and determination, Americans would end problems, not ameliorate them. Kelling wanted to change the world, too, and decided to take the reform school offer and use it as a laboratory for his radical ideas.

  Over the course of his tenure at the Lino Lakes facility, Kelling would develop ideas that would have a revolutionary impact on American society. Germinating in the mind of this young white academic were the first inklings of a concept called Broken Windows, an idea that would have a profound impact on cities all over America—and on the life and death of Eric Garner.

  From a sociological perspective, George Kelling occupies a place in American history similar to someone like an Oppenheimer or a Leo Szilard. He would invent a powerful tool. We would argue ferociously over its application. Lives would be lost. And Kelling was destined to become the reluctant symbol of a generational controversy.

  —

  In the small-town Minnesota setting of the Lino Lakes home, “disorder” didn’t have anything to do with race. It wasn’t a code word. Disorder was literally disorder: stuff on the floor.

  Kelling’s early observations of Lino Lakes, at least in his telling, read like a caricature of nut-bar liberal do-gooderism gone awry. The counselors and the psychiatric teams had taken their Freudian methods to the extreme. They refused to intervene in most any clinical situation, lest they interfere with a patient organically acting out his neuroses.

  “You might have a situation where one of the kids would break a glass or a lightbulb in the bathroom, and there would be glass all over the floor,” he says now.

  “And I’d ask, ‘Are we going to clean up the glass?’ And they would look at me strangely, as if to say, ‘What? No.’ Like they were just there to observe.”

  He sighs. “They would literally leave broken gl
ass on the floor.”

  Kelling’s first great discovery was really just a commonsense reaction. He picked up the glass.

  He recalls vividly another incident, where a group of female residents at the facility gathered in a common area, stood on chairs and tables, and began pulling tiles out of the ceiling.

  Kelling arrived on the scene to see a parade of disturbed young women carrying ceiling tiles back and forth, with the therapeutic staff watching, taking notes, and conspicuously not intervening.

  “They were pulling tiles down all over the place, and the staff was just sitting there, observing them like they were zoo animals,” Kelling recalls.

  Not being completely sure of his authority yet, Kelling hesitated at first to intervene, even with tiles flying all around them. Maybe he was missing something? Maybe he needed to be briefed on some background here? He gently asked a nearby staffer if anyone was planning on stopping the young women from, you know, ripping the ceiling open.

  His incredulous staff told him no. Kelling frowned, waited a beat, and ordered the girls removed to their rooms. Then he set about fixing the ceiling.

  Soon after the tile incident, he remembers, a pair of sturdy young male inmates burst into his office. They demanded to see the records of another one of the residents. The two boys, one white and one Native American, both well over two hundred pounds, explained that it was no big deal. They said they had routinely been allowed free access to records under the previous administration.

  Kelling heard the boys out, then answered.

  “First of all,” he said, “go back outside, knock on the door, and wait for me to tell you that you can come in. Then, if I say you can, come in and ask me that question again.”